


Don't you cry tonight

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5x22 Coda, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Established Skitz, F/M, MCD, MCD pre fic, Spoilers for 5x22
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 08:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14712740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: Talk to me softlyThere's something in your eyesDon't hang your head in sorrowAnd please don't cryDaisy deals with some of the events of 5x22, and the question of where to go from here.Established romantic Skitz. MAJOR SPOILERS for 5x22.





	Don't you cry tonight

**Author's Note:**

> This uses the prompt "Skitz + Don't Cry by Guns and Roses" and combines it with a missing scene idea I had for 5x22. It's angsty, but there's a happy/hopeful ending. Enjoy <3

Daisy took a deep breath and carefully unfolded the postcard. It was dusty, discoloured and ancient and as she ran her finger along the side, it felt like it could collapse and blow away in the wind at any moment. 

Her limbs felt a lot like that too, with exhaustion and the buzz of the Centipede serum warring in her veins and her heart too heavy to give it an outlet. She wanted to run, scream. She wanted to curl up on her bed and cry and cry and cry. But when tears filled her eyes enough to blur Fitz’s handwriting, she just wiped them away. Took another deep breath. The world was still turning, after all. They’d had a great victory today and it had never felt so hollow. 

Her arms were still burning with the weight of throwing Talbot into the sky.

Her lungs dragged breath in and out of her chest with the knowledge that she had only been able to win because Coulson had volunteered to die.

Her heart. Her heart ached because after all this it was a freak accident that had taken Fitz away. It was a sudden, violent, incomplete death. He’d saved Polly and Mack. The day had been won. Yet still, the cosmos had demanded its price. 

And maybe she shouldn’t have cared so much. Maybe it shouldn’t have hurt like this. There were still a lot of wounds between them that needed stitching, after all. But she’d always believed they’d get there eventually: that, bad as it was, it would not be forever. It seemed impossible that she’d be mad at him forever. She only wished she’d had more time, to get there naturally - or at least, to be there when he died. To hear him plead for the others’ lives as the world collapsed and he couldn’t stop it. To hear his true heart bleeding through: good even in his final moments. The man she knew. Maybe then, she’d cry. 

Then again, cruelest of ironies, he would be the one that she would want to go to. Mack was having a hard enough time with his friend dying in front of him, dying clutching his hand, dying under his watch. Simmons had just lost her best friend and partner of almost half her life. And May, well, as kind and helpful as May could be at times, she just wasn’t any good at grasping that all consuming need to scream and cry and rage against the dark. Daisy had no doubt she’d felt it in her past, but it was not something she dared revisit. It was buried too deep. The only one left who might get it was Coulson, but the thought of going to him – even the thought of him, at all, at the moment - sent a spike of pain through her chest, seared her lungs like the Gravitonium had. 

She was alone. 

Not as alone as she once had been, not as alone as she could have been. As mixed and matched and patched up as her family was, she knew they’d come back together after all this. Because of all this. But still, there was something that she and Fitz had always shared, something they had never quite defined but something that she needed in this moment, and she missed him acutely. She longed to feel his warm body cradle hers. For the coldness and distance that had plagued them to disappear. She longed for the intimacy between hearts that she had stumbled across in him; the very same one they had lost, and never had the chance to get back. 

Oh, what she wouldn’t give to have him hold her like he had that night when everything had gone wrong. To wrap his arms around her and anchor her like a ship lost in a storm. To tell her exactly what she need to hear. To fix it, fix her, fix everything between them. Somehow, it didn’t make it better to know this hadn’t been his way of trying. 

That, she could have handled, Daisy thought. It was not as though Fitz had not tried – even succeeded – at dramatic sacrifices in the past. If Mack had come back saying, _he died saving me,_ maybe that would have been a different story. If he’d died having an impact. Fixing the future. Saving the world. If he’d died with a purpose – even if it had been for her, Daisy thought, she could have handled that. It wouldn’t have seemed quite so cruel. Perhaps it even could have been a little noble; a man looking back on his life, his choices – realising he’s strayed from who he wanted to be – choosing to right the ship even if it meant dying in the end. Dying right. 

But not like this. 

 _None of us saw it coming,_ May had said. _We’re lucky he even made it as long as he did. But there was no way he was ever getting out of there alive. We stayed with him, though. We did the best we could._

 _It wasn’t enough,_ Daisy had said. And left. And ended up here. 

It wasn’t enough to save the world. How could that not be enough? How could all their fighting, all their circular arguments about whether or not time was fixed – all their hoarse-throated bickering about destiny and choice – all the tough, violent, barely tenable decisions they’d made - how could all that feel so fruitless? Even now, Daisy was not sure of the answers. She felt as baffled by it all as she had the very first time she’d looked down at that postcard. 

_Working on it. Fitz._

It felt like such a Fitz thing to say, too. She’d sometimes imagined the tone with which he’d written it. Reassuring them, knowing they’d be scared? Making a promise to himself? Or, perhaps, a little bitter, with the kind of grumpiness they had always mocked him about, as if he could imagine them haranguing him already. Daisy smiled a little at that, and a tear splashed down onto the paper. She hurried to wipe it away but all of a sudden revelation hit her. 

The postcard, the original question, was the answer all along. 

The original postcard was somewhere on this base. 

The original Fitz was still somewhere in space. Frozen. Waiting for the world to end. 

Daisy bolted from her room, holding her breath in case she was somehow mistaken. Clutching the postcard to her chest because as long as she had it, they had answers. They had hope. She bolted into the lab where Jemma was packing away some things and only then did she share this precious hope. 

Jemma’s eyes lit up. 

Their sense of mission bloomed and, bittersweet as it was, it gave them a direction. Undoubtedly, it was a direction that was hard to read; it was pointing at the horizon and saying _first star on your left and straight on til morning._ But it was something. It was closing the loop. It was snatching Fitz’s life back from the jaws of fate – again. 

It was Daisy, sticking her long-suffering hula girl to the sill of the cockpit and watching it tremor, and thinking of Fitz. She remembered the line, last time he’d remarked upon it, when Jemma had salvaged it from the Bus and returned it to her – something like, _get it? she shakes, just like you._ More than that, she remembered the smile on his face. The pride and joy. He must have been thinking up that one for hours, the nerd.

She still didn’t cry though. Not really. 

This time, she smiled.


End file.
